A Few Tips on How to Get Started Writing Poetry

Everybody's trick to writing is their own - this is mine. It may or may not work for you just like sitting alone for hours over a blank sheet may or may not help you. This is written to help people in my position (that is, new to poetry) get off their feet. Like Richard Hugo says in The Triggering Town, keep your crap detector on at all times. If nothing I say helps you, I apologize now. This is how I began and this is how I currently approach the craft.

Step one: Don't sit in a quiet room. Nothing is more painful than sitting in a quiet room for an hour trying to materialize some granule of substance. If left alone, the mind will meander and stagnate, then you will end up thinking about school, work, or, worse, what else you could be doing. You need distractions so you have to actually focus on writing. Turn on the television; listen to a CD or the radio; write in a public place (not a coffee house or bookstore - trust me).

Step one, part 2: Find anyhing to say. Don't worry about changing the established world just starting out, brite about anything you want - shoes, your mood, the atmosphere. Try to avoid clichés unless you can make it fresh - parted lovers, for instance. I suggest writing about specific things at first: odd dreams, people you know, common things. The poet Pablo Neruda is famous for his odes to everyday objects.

Step two: Write your first draft by hand. There's a mechanism in the brain that goes along with typing and it's called wordiness. It's a lot more time consuming and stressful on the body to write by hand. Use the extra time to think. For me, this only works for poetry because the intent is concentrated to 5-100 lines (generally), whereas in short prose and academia, that may be ten times that. That's a lot of pain.